How Clear Positioning Unlocks Your TAM
It's not competition holding you back. It's confusion.
Another way to think about why clear positioning (how you define and talk about what you do and who it’s for) is so important for investor-backed businesses: You can’t fully access your TAM until you clarify your message.
See, the biggest barrier to growth for an investor-backed business typically isn’t competition. It’s confusion.
Think of it like this: There’s a bunch of people out there with the business model, money, and problem that makes them a fit for what you sell. (You wouldn’t have attracted investment in your business if that wasn’t true.) For most B2B businesses, there’s literally thousands of potential customers out there you could work with someday. Add all those people (and what the value of what they could potentially pay you) up, and that’s your total addressable market. That’s your TAM.
But you hold yourself back from accessing the full potential value of your TAM when your unclear messaging requires you to explain or unpack what it is you actually do to all those customers. This lack of clarity adds an unnecessary and wasteful step to the process of getting to know you. It makes your buyer work harder to understand if you’re even worth their time. And lots of otherwise-enthusiastic and willing buyers will just give up and look elsewhere if you make them do that work.
Clear positioning clears a path for your market to your door. It creates a more direct route to all those buyer relationships you’re trying to build. It lightens their load and makes it less intimidating for them to introduce themselves to you.
And especially in more technical categories, it’s a powerful and underrated way to build trust. “I like those guys,” people say about companies with clear positioning. “I can tell they’ve done some work to make it easier for me to understand what they do. I appreciate that.”
The more people that understand what you do and why it’s valuable, the more people you can successfully sell to, and the more people will proactively ask for your help (or at least take your call when you reach out).
Your TAM doesn’t change that much over time. Even if you analyzed and sized your market years ago, all those potential customers you talked about with your investors during diligence are probably still there, waiting.
And clear positioning is how you make it obvious to them why it’s worth meeting (and working with) you.
My Best Stuff on Positioning
If you’re rethinking your positioning or you’re just curious about what makes good positioning good, here’s my three best resources on the topic:
By The Way… There’s a Podcast Now
Good news: The Hello Operator podcast is now live on all major podcast platforms. If you like my writing, you’ll love my audio essays.
Check it out on Spotify and Apple podcasts (and remember to subscribe and leave me a review). I’ll also be hosting the occasional AMA episode, so if you have questions you’d like answered on the pod, drop me a line at podcast@hellooperator.com.
This is exactly where TRM + ICP do the real work. TAM tells you who could buy. TRM forces the focus on who you should go after right now. ICP narrows it to who actually buys, adopts, and expands.
When TRM/ICP are fuzzy, positioning gets vague and TAM stays theoretical. Clear positioning doesn’t magically unlock TAM — focus does. Positioning just removes friction after you’ve made the hard choices.
Most teams don’t lose deals to competitors. They lose them because buyers shouldn’t need a decoder ring to understand what you do.